Information retrieval systems (i.e., search systems) as well as recommendation systems are widely integrated and used by most websites and digital content stores. An information retrieval system uses terms and phrases to index, retrieve, organize and describe documents. When a user enters a search query, the terms in the query are identified and used to retrieve documents from the information retrieval system, and then rank them. However, conventional search systems are rarely personalized and provide the same search results to all users. Additionally, conventional recommendation systems provide recommendations primarily based on the individual items that a user has previously purchased/browsed.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such approaches with some aspects of the present method and apparatus set forth in the remainder of this disclosure with reference to the drawings.